Video: Chocolate and Salt Tasting with the Portlandia crew and The Meadow's Mark Bitterman

What could be more Portlandia than a store that sold artisanal salt and artisanal chocolate? Nothing. Which is why we decided to catch up with Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, stars of the aforementioned comedy series that's now in their 3rd season on IFC, at The Meadow, salt and chocolate expert Mark Bitterman's emporium in New York's West Village—the original is in Portland, of course—over some Marlborough Flaky (great on margaritas) and Pralus Tobago (a most mysterious chococlate)

The Salt Tasting

Mark Bitterman's Tasting Notes:

Garibaldi Sea Salt

Made in Oregon by a toussle-haired guy who hauls seawater from the coast into big metal pans and boils it off over a propanestove until salt crystals emerge. Not quite as old school as Lewis and Clark, who also made salt on the Oregon coast before returning east after their 3000 mile trek west, but it does indeed taste the part: metallic, bitter, and bold. Throw it on charred winter roots pulled from the fire, or sprinkle it over something heavy and spicy like a Cuban sandwich or bouillabaisse.

Amabito no Moshio

2,500 years ago, when Japan was essentially a Neolithic society clinging to the sea and subsisting on fishing, the Japanese would haul seaweed to shore and allow it dry. After spraying it with saltwater, drying it again, and repeating the process until encrusted with salt, the seaweed would be rinsed to make concentrated brine that would then be boiled over a wood fire until salt crystals formed. The color of cafe-au-lait, this salt hums with the prized flavor of umami. Try it on cucumbers, sandwiches,veal medallions, or the rim of a dark beer.

Marlborough Flaky

White on blue-white fragments that are soft, undulating and frothy. More...

This salt is all about the shape of the crystals themselves: so fine and quick to dissolve they regale you with intensity that never materializes and of luminosity that never blinds. The best thing to meet a butterleaf lettuce salad since olive oil first met vinegar, it's a go-to salt for any fresh vegetables and great on the rim of anything that contains tequila, too.

Haleakala Ruby

A big salt, with crystals that tumble across your grilled mahi mahi in a jumbled scree. Its red color comes from the sacred Hawaiian alaea clay added to the salt as part of the islands' ancient Polynesian tradition of salt making. Big, buttery and lip-smackingly good, try it on pork, seafood, or fruit.

Halen Mon Gold

Crazy trapezoidal flakes of salt that incline more conservative cooks to use a pair of tweezers to season with them. Halen MonGold is cold smoked with ancient Welsh Oak to bring a playful but rustic outdoorsiness to food. It's sort of a caveman chaperone for your food, so don't go easy with it: fling it over butternut squash soup, throw it over grilled or broiled salmon, or scatter it over vanilla bean ice cream.

The Chocolate Tasting

Mark Bitterman's Tasting Notes:

Pralus Tobago Estate 70% Dark Chocolate

Pralus Cacao was one of the major crops grown throughout Tobago, the sister island of Trinidad. Decades of decline have decimated cacao farming and today there are less than 50 farmers in the entire country still producing a crop. This chocolate is made by French chocolate maker Francois Pralus, using the world-class cacao beans grown byTobagonian born Duane. Perhaps the first quality Tobago chocolate to reach U.S. soil in decades, it's refined, pretty, but brooding with mysterious intensity.

Claudio Corallo 73.5 with nibs

The coffee growing, jungle dwelling maestro of chocolate, Claudio Corallo spent years perfecting not just his method for making chocolate, but for growing it, fermenting the beans for over two weeks after they're harvested. Because the chocolate is not made silky smooth with the aid of a chocolate-making vessel called a conche, it floats off the tongue, leaving you speechless.

Pralus Le 100 % Dark Chocolate Bar

Nothing but pure dark chocolate made from the highest quality Criollo cocoa from Madagascar, this chocolate is the one to try if you love espresso. Dense but not daunting with a fresh nose, it has a fruity flavor and more than a smidge of acidic freshness. Carry this with you and eat in the place of your most common vices.

GQ: You guys started out riffing on Portland's cultural ticks and that was really the hook. But now there are characters and story lines that you keep coming back to.

Fred: I think that was what we were originally thinking. Like, Portland was the frame but it was definitely going to be more about us. More about Carrie and Fred, the characters.

GQ: Carrie, you've been a performer with Sleater Kinney and Wild Flag but weren't really an actor. How is the crossover treating you now that you've got three seasons under your belt?

Carrie: As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world. Fred and I made ten or twelve videos together under the moniker ThunderAnts so I feel like we kind of had our thing down. I was really nervous for the first couple of videos, but then I realized that we had this great chemistry.

There's still an element of fear. But I like that. That adrenaline. You go into a new space or we bring in this amazing, Oscar-winning performer, like Tim Robbins. And now you'll be acting with Tim Robbins! It's so much our world, though. It's a world we've curated and created. It's a world where we say, "Here's Portlandia. Sorry, we're sharing a trailer and everything is improvised but if you wanna bring your own wigs...?"

GQ: I'm glad you brought up the elephant in the room. What's the obsession with wigs?

Fred: It transforms everything. There are actually times where I'm not doing much and the wig and the mustache do the whole sketch.

Carrie: There's like this nimbleness that you have to embrace when you're going through three or four sketches a day. So sometimes something so subtle, like the pair of shoes or the wig I'm wearing, is a way into the character.

GQ: I heard that you approached Werner Herzog to be on the show. Do tell.

Fred: We did. That's a person we always wanted on. We wanted him to be a director trying to shoot in Portland. We haven't given up on that. There are other directors, too. John Waters. We wanted him. Most of the time, it's just a matter of scheduling.

GQ: Who came up with the idea to have Martina Navratolova on?

Fred: We had the idea that the Feminist Bookstore ladies that Candice and Toni — would look at their Yelp reviews and see a bad one. We just started writing and thought like, "They see a bad review. They accuse everyone in the bookstore of writing it. But where could they end up? What's the opposite of the feminist bookstore?" And it's a sports bar. But we couldn't figure out who [they were trying hunt down]. I think it was [director] Jonathan Krisel who said, "Martina Navratolova." We were like, wow. She's like what the feminist bookstore is all about. Actually, that's not even Feminism. That's just human might.

GQ: Top three guest stars on your wish list?

Fred: Paul McCartney, Paul Weller, and Woody Allen.

GQ: Okay, last one: are Fred and Carrie going to end up in some weird Oregonian militia at the end of Season 3?